CIRCLE COMMUNITY

Sid Yadav was VP of Product at Teachable. Andrew Guttormsen ran Growth.

Rudy Santino led design. All three had spent years watching creators use Teachable to sell courses and then struggle to actually build communities around those courses.

Facebook Groups were the default — messy, noisy, and owned by a platform that had no interest in serving creators. In 2020, the three of them left to build Circle: a paid community platform where creators owned their space, charged for access, and weren't at the mercy of Facebook's algorithm.

The first version launched in late 2020. It spread quickly through the creator and online education world, where word-of-mouth travels fast and the alternatives were genuinely bad.

Circle charges creators a monthly or annual SaaS subscription — ranging from roughly $89 per month for small communities up to $399 per month for larger operations with advanced features. The members of those communities pay the creator, not Circle.

Circle also takes a small transaction cut on membership fees processed through the platform. The model is clean: Circle is the platform, creators are the operators, members pay to get in.

Recurring revenue from creators, plus a transaction layer on top.

Circle's core product is the community platform: a space where creators can build discussion threads, host live events and streams, offer direct messaging, run courses, and manage paid membership tiers. In recent years they added native Courses — so creators can run both a course and its community in the same place, rather than juggling multiple tools.

They also added workflow automation for community managers who want to send automated welcome sequences, track engagement, or follow up with inactive members.

Circle grew almost entirely through the creator economy flywheel. Creators with large audiences joined the platform, built communities, and then told their audiences about it.

Every launch email that mentioned Circle was free distribution. They also landed at exactly the right moment — 2020 was when live in-person community collapsed and everyone scrambled for online alternatives.

Being a better-looking, purpose-built option compared to Facebook Groups was enough to win early business. The founders' Teachable connections also gave them instant credibility with the online education crowd, who were exactly the target customer.

The community platform space is crowded. Mighty Networks, Discord, Slack, Kajabi, Geneva, and dozens of others are all competing for the same users.

Community platforms are sticky once adopted — but getting creators to switch from wherever they already are is hard work. Circle is also deeply tied to the health of the creator economy.

If that market slows or consolidates, demand for premium community tools could soften. And as Circle grows, it has to keep improving fast enough to stay ahead of well-funded competitors who are watching its every move.

Circle raised from Tiger Global Management, one of the most active tech investors in the 2020-2021 cycle. Early money also came from angel investors embedded in the creator economy ecosystem — people who had operated inside major creator platforms and understood exactly what Circle was trying to build.

The Teachable alumni network was an asset here: credibility in the creator space opened doors that cold outreach never would.